Gilles Bœuf is a biologist, a former professor of environmental physiology at Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University. He chaired for 7 years the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and was in 2013/2014 visiting professor at the College of France in the Chair "sustainable development, energy, environment and society". Member of many scientific councils, he presided over the five-year term of François Hollande the council of the French Agency for Biodiversity of the Ministry of Solidarity Ecology.
Gilles Boeuf is a biologist and professor of environmental physiology at the University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris. In this interview, Gilles Boeuf questions our relationship with nature through contemporary environmental issues, specially the collapse of biodiversity. In this way, he encourages us to look to nature as an ally in order to develop factors of resilience, by participating, for example, in reestablishing and enhancing urban biodiversity.
Contemporary environmental issues, and notably the collapse of biodiversity, demand that we rethink our relationship with nature. To better grasp the issues, biologist Gilles Boeuf makes the distinction between nature—a set of living systems—and biodiversity, its living, universal fraction, that groups together beings and the relationships that they maintain with each other as with their environments. Understanding biodiversity allows us to better understand the way in which nature tends toward a harmony of interdependent systems, but also the value—including on a financial level—of the eco-systemic services that it provides to the human being. In this way, it encourages us to break with our arrogance and to look to nature as an ally, something that it has always been, so as to allow this new alliance to be used to develop factors of resilience, by participating, for example, in reestablishing and enhancing urban biodiversity.
Designing an inclusive city implies involving their residents in urban projects, but what is the role of architects and urban planners in this process? For Andrew Freear, the head of the Rural Studio program, they both have the ethical responsibility of getting locally involved via concrete projects. Architectural schools must thus take on training citizen architects by engaging them in learning by doing, and thus have them redevelop a deep connection with context and places, acting as neighbors and activists within communities in order to collectively carry out experimental projects that tangibly improve society and the environment.
The two Lebanese artists and filmmakers were awarded the 2017 Marcel Duchamp Award for Unconformities, a project currently on display at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. This artwork, like their approach, is based on a methodology of investigation and excavation and aims to offer another reading of history and the traces of the past.
Nicolas Nova is a social anthropologist. Inspired by New Media Studies and design fiction, he contends that the future of design lies in recycling and reparation as well as reinventing forms and functions. Did you know that a used flip-flop could serve as a lighter?
The geographer and orientalist Augustin Berque revisits the polysemic dimension of the term “milieu,” and explains the distinction made by mesology—“the area of biology that deals with the relationships between the environments and organisms”—between “environment” and “milieu.” The reality of things differs depending on the environment of each species or culture, the object doesn’t exist in itself but according to its relationship with the subject. In this way, mesology goes much further than the subject/object dualism of modern science. Ontologically “trajective,” the environment is neither objective nor subjective, but firmly between the two theoretical subject/object centers. Berque takes the term “mediance,” meaning the dynamic coupling of the individual and their surroundings, from the Japanese “fūdo,” to which he adds “trajection,” a process that results in the “mediance” of human existence in its concrete surroundings. Taken as a whole, all human environments, distinct from the biosphere through their eco-techno-symbolic dimension, form the ecumene. For architecture, this implies a respect for history and the environment, without mimicking ancient forms, creating from the “mediance” of each place.
Larissa Fassler is a “Neo-Situationist” artist. By exploring places over the course of many hours, she gleans their ephemeral essence, which she then superimposes on the fixed urban master plan. The subjective maps thus generated highlight both urban narratives and history.
Maximum is a design studio that maximizes the value of waste; its material, its form and its engineering. Some materials are transformed in a semi-industrial process while others give birth to unique pieces, such as the glass walls of the Centre Pompidou caterpillar.
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